Fallout and the Monomyth

"You know I just don't get it
Last year I was nobody
This year I'm selling records
[...]
You might see me walkin'
You might see me walkin' a dead rottweiler dog with its head chopped off in the park with a  spiked collar, hollerin' at him 'cause the sonova bitch won't quit barkin'"

Eminem - Marshall Mathers


I replayed the original Fallout earlier this year in preparation for trying the later games, having previously stopped a few missions into Fallout 2. It was enough to remind me that computer games' tendency toward derivative asides and gratuitous pop culture references was even more pronounced in the old days.

So much of '90s culture centered on the thrill of maladapting mundane activities to a computer. Game designers didn't seem to think their works capable of standing on their own feet, and like Gil Bates vs. Appleby in Arcanum, such references have become even more jarring as their sources sink out of memory. Do any bastards even bother to kill Kenny any more?

That situation above came about due to my unwarranted frugality. By the end of the game I had stockpiled explosives and ammunition for weapons I hadn't even used yet, so I decided to burn some of it to murder The Hub why not. Pretty sure that's how WWI came about too. Results of getting triple-drugged out of one's skull while sitting on a pile of military hardware?

I see pew.
I see pew.

I see lots of pew-pew.
I was impressed, however, that butchering the largest extant settlement innocent by innocent did not manage to entirely erase the good reputation I'd built up. It makes sense in retrospect but we simply don't expect games to make sense. RPGs have trained us to expect the panopticon to turn every city guard hostile against us at the first transgression, yet your game should not be forcing me to play a single-note, flat do-gooder or do-badder. Did I not just single-handedly save entire cities from fiery draconic doom? Or the multiverse from being gobbled by several and sundry eldritch horrors? That hard-won karmic bank should not be emptied simply because I decide to gut a few hobos in my spare time. Get off my marginally heroic back.

So while I'm sitting pretty in the pew-pews I came to a strange realization. Fallout was not a very good game. Which is confusing because it's still a great game, one of the greatest... just not very good. Could my nostalgia be so wrong?

I mean, look at its combat system, both underdeveloped and burdened with utterly extraneous or impractically cosmetic skills, perks, etc. Look at its half implemented stealth system or its gigantic amounts of pointless map space, or its uneven leveling and loot distribution with huge gimmies like the Glow or the Deathclaw warehouses. Look at how tiny it is in number of towns / NPCs / quests / monsters compared to... say its close contemporary Baldur's Gate. So why, while I declared BG1 "good, not great" can I stand by retroactively labeling Fallout "great, not good" - ?

Aesthetic design plays a huge role. BG was kitchen sinked together from DnD tropes without much regard for coherence, but Fallout managed to cobble its own take on Cold War Apocalyptic fiction and keep it fresh. Visually and aurally it out-shone its competition in conveying its dusty, farcically grim setting. There's a reason why everyone still remembers "war... war never changes."

Just as importantly, it mastered the all-important art of escalation. As I commented in one of my Bloodlines posts, RPGs bank on the "rags to riches" narrative trope, and too many skimp on the rags. Fallout provided every step up the ladder, made you feel each incremental improvement from tossing rocks at rats to blasting genetically engineered monstrosities with laser chainguns and plasma rifles. The rocks are important, something easily forgotten in favor of the later industry standard of boosting the player to level three or five in the very tutorial. The crowbar became so emblematic of Half-Life because you actually used it!

More than that, Fallout successfully married its practical gameplay escalation to its thematic shift from the mundane to the Scie Fie. The monomythic hero's journey entails traveling to wondrous new realms, but those realms are wondrous only in contrast to hum-drum human normalcy. The mundane must occupy at least some screen time if you're to successfully offset your more alluring locales. Lothlorien and Mordor shine only in contrast to the Shire. Shady Sands is every bit as necessary as the Brotherhood of Steel. Lvl 1 is every bit as important as Lvl 20.

"Whatever happened to catching the good old-fashioned passionate ass-whooping and getting your shoes, coat and your hat tooken?"